AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.
By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
arXiv:2606. 29664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been systematically tested, especially in agriculture applications.
By Zhuocheng Shang, Sanmay Das, Ahmed Eldawy
arXiv:2608. 04792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate estimation of Above-Ground Biomass (AGB) from satellite imagery is essential for the large-scale monitoring of carbon stocks, yet it remains a challenging regression task at global scale.
By Ghjulia Sialellia, Linus Scheibenreif, Jan Dirk Wegner, Konrad Schindler
arXiv:2606. 05731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-season crop type mapping is critical for food security in the face of increasingly extreme climate-related threats to crops.
By August Posch, Jitendra Kumar, Forrest M. Hoffman, Auroop R. Ganguly
The study evaluates 13 Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) for estimating above‑ground biomass (AGB) from satellite imagery, comparing them to a fully supervised state‑of‑the‑art baseline trained on the AGBD dataset. Most GFMs perform worse than the baseline, but TESSERA and AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) features combined with specific prediction heads achieve superior results, with the best model attaining an RMSE of 50.79 Mg/ha. This AEF‑based model also generalizes better to unseen regions, reduces RMSE by up to 25% in excluded areas, and matches the ESA CCI biomass product when trained on limited regional labels.
By Ghjulia Sialelli, Linus Scheibenreif, Jan Dirk Wegner, Konrad Schindler
Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been systematically tested, especially in agriculture applications. This paper presents a controlled benchmark that evaluates three models, Prithvi, SpectralGPT, and SatMAE, on multi-temporal crop segmentation and change detection across four U.
The study evaluates the use of frozen geospatial foundation embeddings (AlphaEarth) for mapping cultivated versus non‑cultivated land in Maine. Using 192 spatially separated patches and USDA Cropland Data Layer labels, a lightweight classifier achieved 93.7% overall accuracy without fine‑tuning, and a nearest‑class‑centroid rule reached 90.2%. A balanced sample of 60,000 labeled pixels was nearly as effective as the full 8.6 million‑pixel pool, and classifiers trained in one year remained accurate across 2018‑2023. In a blind human validation of 385 points, the AlphaEarth‑plus‑random‑forest map matched 95.3% of the consensus, outperforming the CDL reference (91.7%).
By Mohammad Ammar Mughees, Giovanni Montefoschi, Zhongxin Chen, Maria Antonia Brovelli
arXiv:2610.08810v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fine-tuned geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) pretrained on large satellite archives have been shown to improve crop classification accuracy and geo...
By Venkatesh Kolluru, Rajat Shinde, Abdelhak Marouane, Caden Helbling, Deepak Shah, Othneil Drew, Srinivas Kolluru, Iksha Gurung, Manil Maskey, Rahul Ramachandran
arXiv:2607. 27217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical indicator of ecosystem productivity and terrestrial carbon storage, yet regional carbon monitoring remains constrained by the sparse spatial and temporal availability of field inventories and airborne structural measurements.
By Shashika Lamahewage, Chandi Witharana
The study evaluates how the length of observation windows affects the performance of Tessera embeddings for land‑use/land‑cover mapping. By freezing the encoder and recomputing embeddings from a full year down to a single day, the authors benchmark linear probes and UNet heads on LUCAS, DynamicEarthNet, and PASTIS‑R datasets. Results show that embeddings are highly task‑dependent: for phenology‑driven classes (PASTIS‑R) they outperform from‑scratch models by ~46%, while for temporally stable classes (DynamicEarthNet, LUCAS) they match only with full supervision, yet remain more label‑efficient across all datasets.
By Julia Guerrero-Viu, Alex L\'opez-Cifuentes, Ignacio P\'erez-Villar, Fabio Pacifici
arXiv:2609.28194v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Old-growth forests develop over centuries under minimal anthropogenic disturbance, producing structurally complex and biodiverse stands. In Europe, pro...
By Thomas Ratsakatika (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK), Mihai Zotta (Fundatia Conservation Carpathia, Brasov, Romania), Srinivasan Keshav (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK), Emily R. Lines (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK)
arXiv:2607. 10231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tree crowns are a challenging target for resilient AI because they are not static objects: their spectral response, internal texture, translucency, and apparent boundaries change substantially across the growing season.
By Taimur Khan